Facebook now removes your deleted photos from its servers in 30 days or less

In the past, it’s taken up to a year for Facebook to fully delete users’ photos—if they were deleted at all.

Now those photos that show you vomiting on yourself will finally be deleted from Facebook. For real, this time

Facebook recently confirmed that photographs deleted by users will be removed much more quickly from the company’s content delivery networks (CDN) than they have been in the past.

Back in 2009, Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng discovered that photos she had deleted from Facebook were still kept on the social network’s servers. Although the photos didn’t show up in her photo albums, you could still view them if you had their URLs. It took over a year for those images to finally be deleted from Facebook’s CDN.

Facebook, for their part, told Cheng that her circumstance was rare. Cheng was of course suspicious of the social network’s claims, particularly since several of her readers reached out and told her that they were experiencing similar issues. She also suspected that her photos in particular were deleted only after her article drew attention to the problem.

Three years later, the social network is finally changing its tune. In February, a spokesperson confirmed that Facebook was switching its photo storage to newer systems that would take care of the non-deletion problem.

Just how long before embarrassing and undesirable images are purged for good? No more than 30 days, sometimes even less.

“As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure, we have instituted a ‘max-age’ of 30 days for our CDN links,” Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens told Ars Technica. “However, in some cases the content will expire on the CDN much more quickly, based on a number of factors.”